pcPuppyOS RC3 Now Available - 29 Jan 2008 EDIT: 30 Jan

[Pizzasgood]

I was unclear about the file MU posted. Here's why. I know that initrd.gz is what determines which version of pup_xxx.sfs gets loaded into the ramdisk. Doesn't that mean that if MU patches the standard initrd.gz, his fix is only good for vanilla Puppy 3.01? To get a fix for pcpuppy os wouldn't I need to download an initrd.gz specific to pcpuppyos?

Yep. But the one you already had should have refused to load into ram with less than 640 mb anyways, since I modified that by hand. MU's fix will be in the next iso, but it shouldn't make a difference on the user end. It just means that I don't have to manually adjust the size every time I make the iso bigger. Which is nice.

but maybe you could just upload & release xdelta patches until you go gold (telling people to just upgrade previous ISOs).

Nah, it's not a big deal. And if for some reason I really couldn't stand the idea of not being able to reboot or restart X for a couple hours, I could just shunt the ISO over to my other machine via ethernet, then upload it from there to leave my main machine free.

[swarnick]

I'm not sure I was supposed to even try this but what I did got me into trouble so in the interest of sparing others I'll describe the problem.

1. I tried to change to JWM in pcPuppyOS RC3.
2. Once I exited to the prompt, the X-server would no longer start.
3. I tried setting back to icewm (xwin icewm) but X still wouldn't start.
4. I finally traced the problem to the current window manager file in /etc. It was set to jwm. Specifying another window manager to xwin didn't change it. Since X wouldn't start I could use a graphical tool to fix it.
5. I edited the file to make icewm current and X started.

[Pizzasgood]

JWM was removed, so I'm not surprised you had issues when trying to use it. Though I am surprised that xwin icewm didn't modify the file. You should have been using xwin starticewm but the file should still have changed.

Since X wouldn't start I could[n't] use a graphical tool to fix it.

So are you saying you powered down then booted with pfix=ram to check the file? Instead, you could have used mp which is a very handy CLI text editor that uses "normal" keyboard shortcuts (ctrl+s, ctrl+q).



I made a new iso tonight with the dynamic size detection MU mentioned, the latest Wine (0.9.54), updated ClamAV virus definitions (as of Feb 6, 2008), Xdelta, and a fix so that Firefox shows "open with ghostview" on pdf files (finally tracked down the file to edit: /etc/mailcap).

I'm in the process of uploading now. Will be providing an Xdelta .delta file too, weighing in at only 16 MB. Good stuff

[swarnick]

So are you saying you powered down then booted with pfix=ram to check the file? Instead, you could have used mp which is a very handy CLI text editor that uses "normal" keyboard shortcuts (ctrl+s, ctrl+q).

Nope, I just worked from the command line using e3vi. I have to work on a lot of Unix and Linux systems on my job using remote terminal connections so vi and vim have become my friends.

xwin icewm didnt' switch the current wm in the file. Neither did startx icewm. I think it's really a bug, but if we aren't ever supposed to switch window managers it doesn't really matter.

Does your response mean that if I loaded jwm as a pet it would work? Sorry to be a window manager bigot but I have grown very fond of jwm and I think other people have to. In fact, I think that switching to icewm might actually cut down on the number of users/adopters for pcPuppyOS, because it's just one more set of new things to learn and do before you can get down to working comfortably. I spent about 20 minutes learning how to add apps to the icewm launch bar. It turned out to be really easy but it wasn't new knowledge I was eager to acquire.

I miss Blinky--can he only run in the jwm tray or there another good reason he's turned up missing?

To conclude: Please consider supporting multiple window managers. You are already at 600 MB, so I don't think the space for jwm is an issue.

[Pizzasgood]

Yes, installing it from PETget should work. The menus may look odd though, and the "fixmenus" option might be missing.

Tray apps that work in JWM don't necissarily work in IceWM. But I thought we had a patched Blinky included. I'll look into that later today, along with the xwin thing. Though looking at the code, I don't see why it would fail. Things don't get much simpler than this:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
#(c) Copyright Barry Kauler 2003,2004,2005,2006,2007 www.puppylinux.com
#2007 Lesser GPL licence v2 (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/lgpl.html)

[ -z $DISPLAY ] || exit #v2.11 from GuestToo.
echo "This script will run X windows for you..."

#variables created at bootup by init script in initrd...
. /etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE #v2.02
#PUPMODE=current operating configuration,
#PDEV1=the partition have booted off, DEV1FS=f.s. of PDEV1,
#PUPSFS=pup_201.sfs versioned name, stored on PDEV1, PUPSAVE=vfat,sda1,/pup_save.3fs
#PMEDIA is a broad description of the boot media, ex "usbflash" or "idehd".

#0.9.9 enables to start a specific w.m. from commandline...
if [ $1 ];then
 echo -n "$1" > /etc/windowmanager
 #note, /root/.xinitrc uses this file.
fi

One thing I just noticed though, is there is a line at the end of /root/.xinitrc that only runs if the /etc/windowmanager turns out to be a dud. As a last resort, it tries running jwm. It doesn't modify the /etc/windowmanager file or anything though, but I could at least change that to starticewm.

[Pizzasgood]

Yes, the patched Blinky is there. It probably only starts up when you use starticewm instead of icewm.

I'm not sure what happened with xwin. As far as I can tell it's working fine. I tried xwin jwm and got the expected error. Then I tried xwin icewm and IceWM started. Then I hit <ctrl><backspace> and used xwin starticewm and that worked right too.

[swarnick]

Pizzasgood--

Here is what I think I did. I will try and remember and also try to reproduce. It may be that what I was trying to do is just wrong
<ctrl><alt><backspace>
startx jwm
No error, changes /etc/currentwm
startx
crashes x as jwm is CURRENTWM but it isn't there
startx icewm
crashes x

It's supposed to be xwin jwm and xwin icewm. I thought startx passes the arguments to xwin, but I'm not sure.

I think you are done with this unless I can reproduce the error.

[swarnick]

On tmmxine shard (puppy 3.01 base with xfce) I can recompile vim, gvim, slang, jed and xjed. The c compiler is devx_301.sfs.

On pcPuppyOS (puppy 3.01 base with icewm) the results are strange.
Vim compiles but the makefile doesn't find gvim.
Slang won't compile due to missing X server dependencies.
Jed and Xjed won't compile because slang is not valid.

Is there some reason why these compilations produce such different results on what is essentially the same Puppy 3.01 system? The only possibilities I can think of are: (1) pcPuppyOS uses different gtk2 and X libraries or (2) the compiler versions are different.

I will try the compilations again and capture the error--that make help someone shed some light for me.

[Pizzasgood]

startx is just a symlink to xwin, so it shouldn't matter which you use.

Hmmm.... it looks like about 200 out of 17781 files are missing from the development package. That's odd. Must have been a bad copy or something. I'll have to fix that. Good catch. I compiled several things with it before and it never complained to me.